The Army Advances

Turd's Army, led by Brigadier General Andrew Maguire, made significant advances against enemy positions in June.

Keep in mind how this works. As a member of Andy's service, "DayTrades", you get to follow along to see where and when Andy puts on positions throughout the trading day. Two important items:

The bulk of this trading takes place during London market hours.

The service has just recently made a significant upgrade to their server speeds. This will allow members to see Andy's moves almost instantaneously.

For example, here's a snippet of yesterday's feed:

08:53:14 andy: stops seen on the last test of the high, I am buying one lot of Gold here
08:53:28 andy: 1593.60
08:53:46 andy: target 1598
08:55:28 andy: taking profit here at market
08:55:33 andy: 1597
08:55:40 andy: closing stop
08:56:39 andy: may see some fix painting shortly so a pull back to 1589 would be a likely entry
09:02:47 andy: 1602 saw strong defence/ resistance but the stops above would expose stops to 1618/20,possibly see a pull back first , in the next hour..
10:11:58 andy: I am selling one lot of Gold here 1598.90 stop 1599.30
10:12:37 andy: target 1595.20
10:13:31 andy: this is a speculative A/R pivot so tight stop
10:20:02 andy: stopped

Below is a chart of the cumulative performance of "The Army" since inception back in April.

What this shows is that a trader who followed Andy's trades exactly (Which, admittedly, can be a little challenging sometimes. You have to be committed and paying attention.) is up $16,070 over the past 2.5 months. And this is only trading one contract, every single time. And this is also in an extremely challenging market environment. After fees and less whatever commission you pay your broker, the member is probably up at least 13Gs. Not too shabby. That's eight, shiny and sparkly gold eagles in your safe to help you survive the coming onslaught.

One other thing that members receive is Andy's weekly commentary. There are a lot of big-dollar individuals worldwide who subscribe to Andy's services simply to receive these updates. As a Turd Army regular, you get to see them, too. There is no one on the face of the planet more qualified to charge for precious metal commentary than Andy. As a 30-year veteran of London gold and silver trading, he has an extensive list of contacts and clients as well as a depth of knowledge and experience that is unmatched. If you want to know what is really going on, Andy will tell you every weekend when he posts his commentary.

MetalsTrades Commentary - June 24th 2012I will start by answering some excellent, member questions….
…“I came across this article yesterday, claiming the 515 metric tons dumped in the market place per "The London Trader", did not happen as they were unable to see it on the open interest. Would appreciate Andrew’s input and rebuttal.”
Regards…This is a good question and considering COT inspired waterfall selloff events usually follow a similar pattern, it is worth taking the time to follow the footprints through this specific event. This dissection will be helpful for a lot of members as this is a common and very profitable ongoing COT, (Bullion Bank), MO and should help clear up a lot of confusion amongst market participants regarding the relationship between the Comex vs. the OTC spot and physical markets.This blogger expresses a healthy skepticism, is well measured and rational but makes a few commonly held false assumptions that I will seek to address. I will start by pasting the relevant sections directly from the blog…
………”He does not define the term “paper gold” but we can assume he means either London gold Forwards or COMEX gold Futures. This seems to be confirmed by his remark that the anonymous “Eastern buyers” will “patiently convert” their “paper gold” to “physical in the coming weeks.” I assume this means that they will stand for delivery of their contracts”…..

My response to this is No. Sovereign, CB and physical buyers in size do not buy paper gold contracts on the Comex; this refers to spot indexing in the OTC spot market in London. This is a classic case of the Comex tail wagging the much larger spot dog. Due to both leverage and the timed deployment of established and verifiable concentrated short Bullion bank COT positioning in the Comex paper market, the price of bullion is concurrently set in the spot market. This by default enables those seeking allocation of physical in size to take advantage of the resulting discounted spot prices and lock in spot purchases on intraday/month dips in the size they wish to take delivery of at an upcoming fix. This spot indexing transaction is simply an FX currency trade where the purchaser of physical is going long gold and short USD/ EUR etc., locking in the price of gold vs. that currency. Once spot XAU/ USD, XAU/EUR etc. has been purchased, the currency price for the size of allocation sought is locked in no matter how high the price of gold may rise to on the date the spot currency purchase is cashed in for physical at a bullion bank, producer or refiner etc. at that chosen days gold fix price.
Then…...” I also assume that he is not referring to naked, leveraged longs that are forced to liquidate as the price falls, due to margin calls. He explicitly said it was “the bullion banks” doing the selling of these 515 metric tons.

Let’s look at the numbers. 515 metric tons equals 16,557,634.5 troy ounces. Rounding to the nearest 100-ounce COMEX contract, this adds up to 165,576 contracts. 165,576 new contracts were dumped onto the market on June 7, according to the London Gold Trader…...”

In response, here is where a walkthrough of the event would be helpful….1st to the bones of the discussion.

There were indeed 165,555 GCQ contracts sold during the 4 hours in question, as described in the MT post in real time on the day it occurred. The selling emanated from a bullion bank and was initially instigated in the pit about 1 hour ahead of Bernanke’s speech. Although one might expect some last minute squaring/positioning ahead of pivotal news it in not normal to see short selling/new supply commence in size so far ahead of such a price moving event. With initial selling stemming out of the pit in noticeably large tranches, and as reported to me by my contacts from a name associated with a large bullion bank, this also had the intended effect of telegraphing sell intent to the locals.

Even with that information set aside, what the blogger is missing here is that almost all these contracts were subsequently covered by the bullion bank into the days pit close thereby not showing up in the closing OI #.This is a standard MO. Through concentration, creating sufficient new supply at commonly watched pivots in a very short period of time to swamp any bids distorting true supply demand fundamentals, then once the momentum is turned down, to buy back all originating short positions into freshly pitched longs and a whole array of freshly invited new shorts.

Obviously, there is always a long for every short etc. but nevertheless the equivalent of 515 tons of paper gold was sold that would not have been sold had the bullion banks not used the power of their concentration to create sufficient supply to instigate and then game carefully orchestrated air pockets for the market to do the rest of the heavy lifting. This resulted in a stair step transference of COT shorts and was conducted at the expense of, (MM, spec’s and techs), initially by tripping longs stops, then drawing in fresh short supply on the breach of very obvious technical supports. (In this case with volume through the well watched 50 & 10 DMA’s).

These progressive breaches activated stair step knee jerk momentum selling and flipped the always present ‘neutral algo’s’, (as dissected in a prior MT commentary), over to a sell side bias. Guess who was on the other side of those trades profitably buying back the newly instigated supply? The daily downward move was then consolidated with a bearish close just below the 10DMA. (Bear in mind long or short stops are clearly visible to the 2 COT bullion banks identified in the OCC reports, concurrently holding the book on over 97% of all OTC gold and silver derivatives, a market 10 times the size of the Comex. These 2 COT banks also maintain concentrated short controlling positions in the futures markets).

Now, breaking down the footprints in more detail….

Preceding the pit selling, obvious spoofing was seen which given the signature footprints had to be from a COT algo and foreshadowed mal intent. If you recall from the MT post, we saw a very strong showing at the PM fix with large allocation sought in size, yet into the fix, we saw a block order of 10,000 GCQ contracts hitting all the bids for an $8 drop ahead of the fix followed by 35,000 contracts hitting all the bids for another $20 followed by a small $5 rise into the pit close where we saw large allocation sought at 1606. At this point, some short covering was seen, looking like a bottom likely drawing in some new longs, followed by another 30K selling tranche followed by the residuals over the remaining couple of hours. There was an obvious round off of short covering of around 50K seen into the pit close. This exercise resulted in an extremely profitable trade which also opened a window to repay/rebuy some previously underwater gold leases here in London. I am very close to the physical market here and am almost certain this was the case.

Obviously, aside from my observations and sources, I verified my information with both a trusted pit contact and traders here in London; also independently I saw this from an individual who I respect, Jesse, who appears to have concluded similar observations.
Jesse comments 08 June … “One has to consider information such as this as input to be compared to other things, since we cannot directly view what the unidentified source is specifically seeing.
However, having watched the tape in real time and looked at the changes in Open Interest, it seems to be a credible description of what happened.
It also tracks closely with my own view of the game which we are in…”

I hope my sharing this with you has been helpful.

Once again, if you are an experienced trader, I urge you to consider this service. The goal is to profit by trading along and against The Cartels and then convert each monthly gain into physical metal, thereby decreasing their available supply. If we only have a handful of members, the physical effect is negligible. However, if we can get a couple hundred folks working this program...well, then maybe we could have an impact. Regardless of that, in the end, members of The Army will be consistently adding to their stacks of physical, and there's certainly nothing wrong with that.

301 Comments

Yesterday's CoT was very, very interesting. Here's a re-post of my comments from yesterday afternoon:

I WAS EXPECTING A POSITIVE AND HELPFUL CoT. WHAT WE GOT IS TERRIFIC!

GOLD

For the reporting week, price fell about $49 and total OI dropped 4,874 to 413,618. Now, check this out: The Gold cartel net short position was reduced by 19,531 contracts to just 144,170 and a net short ratio at 1.93:1. Again and for perspective, as recently as 2/28/12, the Gold Cartel net short ratio was 2.69:1. And check out the idiot specs: Large specs added net short 13,785 and the small specs added net short 5,746. Gee, I wonder who got fleeced (AGAIN) today??? Bahhhh, Baaaahhh. Baaaaaaahhh.

SILVER

The silver CoT is simply fantastic. Remember for context that silver plunged $1.55 and OI rose by 6000 contracts on 6/21/12. Even though OI fell back 3000 on Tuesday, check out the changes for the reporting week!

The Silver Cartel decreased their net short position by 4,943 contracts. They are now net short just 12,011 contracts and they have a never-before-seen-by-Turd net short ratio of 1.25:1. Again and for perspective, on April 5, 2011, The Silver Cartel was net short 56,414 contracts and held a net short ratio of 2.69:1. Even on 2/28/12, they were net short 44,593 and had a ratio of 2.32:1.

Remember, the final surge in the month of April 2011 was almost entirely caused by Silver Cartel panic short covering. They then realized that they were trapped and have engineered the 14 months since to buy themselves time to cover in a more orderly (and profitable) manner. They are almost finished as their net short position has now been trimmed by an amazing 85%.

​And here's one more for you: On 4/5/11, The Silver Cartel held 33,413 contracts long. This was 23.36% of the total open interest. On 2/28/12, they still held just 33,802 long but this was now 29.17% of the total OI. As of Tuesday, The Silver Cartel how holds 48,591 contracts long. This is an increase of 44% since 2/28/12 and it represents 38.51% of the total open interest.

HERE IS YOUR EXTREMELY IMPORTANT TAKEAWAY: THOUGH A STOP-GUNNING PLUNGE THROUGH $25 IS STILL POSSIBLE, WE ARE VERY, VERY CLOSE TO THE BOTTOM IN SILVER. FROM THERE, WE WILL ALL EXPERIENCE A MOVE HIGHER THAT WILL BE BREATHTAKING.

I'm not trying to confuse or deceive. Silver is headed much, much higher in fiat-conversion terms. Much higher. Not a question of "if". Only a question of "when". And when is pretty soon.

Recall that I am on record in predicting (hoping for?) "an explosive and fun summer". Northern hemisphere summer began on June 21. It ends on September 21. Northern hemisphere autumn (9/21-12/21) will be quite fun, too. And it'll finally be football season again.

We had some email exchanges about this. I personally would love to participate, i have all the tools that are required in place AND the experience in trading needed, yet i don't have 200k needed to join this army (physical, wink wink).

And i don't think i am the only one.

This is a pity. If there would be an option for people to team up, pool their money to cough up the 200k required, and participate this way, i am certain you would have a lot more soldiers.

As an added bonus to your army I do have to give you and Andy credit for employing tactics that are far more sophisticated and specific than what the SLA employs, which is basically: "BTFD; Crash JPM; Buy Silver, Bitchez!"

P.S. Are we safe to assume that Brigadier General Maguire will outrank Max's General Rasta in these combined forces?

Ag CoT

Look at the silver CoT graph, will ya...

#194 is going to be a really fun newsletter to write. The first one even resembling fun in a few weeks. Finally we've got the goons (US and their Euro goon counterparts) behind us and it looks like the analysis is (finally) being confirmed and finally knows what the #%@$! it is doing in the immediate term as well as the intermediate term.

The post today had several very important points, including the confirmation that the Cartel intentionally times their actions just prior to Fed speeches, and the massive selling of paper gold is immediately covered the same day to help cover the Cartel's tracks.

All of this has been suspected previously, and discussed at length in Turd's blog.

The bit of news that took me by surprise is the off-the-cuff statement that the bullion banks making up the Cartel actually have access to the stops put in place by the hedge funds and other large traders:

(Bear in mind long or short stops are clearly visible to the 2 COT bullion banks identified in the OCC reports, concurrently holding the book on over 97% of all OTC gold and silver derivatives, a market 10 times the size of the Comex. These 2 COT banks also maintain concentrated short controlling positions in the futures markets).

Am I reading this right? Are the bullion banks the de facto "market makers" for precious metals, and hence get to see what stops and buy orders the market has in place long before they are executed? If true, then any trading at all by the bullion banks would be an incredible violation of fiduciary duties.

How can they get away with this? The bullion banks would be playing both sides, and using information confidentially entrusted to them to fleece the very customers who trusted them with this information. This would make the precious metals market the most corrupt and manipulated market in history.

If any of this is true, the hedge funds should go after the bullion banks with everything they've got! I must not be understanding the comment about the Cartel knowing the stops and buy positions. Can someone clarify this for me?

I've been a subscriber to his newsletter for years. Good solid, balanced macro analysis. Sure he's wrong at times, but HOW he goes about analyzing the markets is the key; He's non denominational so to speak. For me, the analysis allows me to have a solid backdrop to make more informed investment decisions.

He's been managing a theme this year that hasn't quite played out yet, and he's recently lost a few subscribers because of it. I consider that bullish in terms of the theme he presents.

>Am I reading this right? Are the bullion banks the de facto "market makers" for precious metals, and hence get to see what stops and buy orders the market has in place long before they are executed? If true, then any trading at all by the bullion banks would be an incredible violation of fiduciary duties.

Of course they are the defacto market makers. They hold the gold. Who else could possibly do that job (and someone has to)?

They can get away with anything if regulators don't bother to do their jobs (likely at the behest of the Fed).

This video might venture a little too deep down the proverbial rabbit hole for some people's liking, but this guy has been surprisingly bang on the mark with his "predictions".

Carl Calleman is considered by many to be a leading expert on the Mayan Calendar. His view is that the calendar does not predict the end of the world per se, but the end of a type of world (or system) as we have come to know it.

Keep in mind that Calleman does not have a dog in this fight over money, PMs etc. He wrote a book in 2004 which he discussed in this interview in 2009.

The 3 predictions made with the book are wholly consistent with things that Turd, JW and others have also been saying here - albeit with Calleman observing them from a different perspective.

"What we see is a confluence of forces that has the potential to solidify a shift towards corporate fascism and encase it in international law. Governments will merely be the tools of the corporations to provide a degree of separation from the inevitable police state that will accompany this corporate global governance. Sovereign governments even with all their failings still have at least some concern for the general welfare of their citizens. Corporations by their very nature have only one purpose and that is to generate profits. If an individual whose sole purpose was to blindly enhance profits, without any regard to the standards of what is wrong and what is right in society, would likely be considered a sociopath by mental health experts."

local coin shop extremely thin on 90% this is the first time i have ever seen them this low. i bought $10 face for just over $200. they could only piece together mixed halves frankls(xf) and walkers(f-vf) and some mercs (f-vf). they say market is very tight. donkey fell off the goat trail on the way home however and all was lost

As I watched the intricate social ballet that occurred as cars and bikes slowed to enter the circle (pedestrians were meant to cross at crosswalks placed a bit before the intersection) Monderman performed a favorite trick. He walked, backward and with his eyes closed, into the Laweiplein. The traffic made its way around him. No one honked, he wasn’t struck .Instead of a binary, mechanistic process – stop, go – the movement of traffic and pedestrians in the circle felt human and organic.”

The above quote is from the ever-readable Dylan Grice’s latest missive in which he argues that regulation acts much like traffic-lights, in that it lulls market participants into a false sense of security.

He uses the the small town of Drachten in Holland, where the removal of road safety measures has doubled traffic flow and resulted in zero fatal accidents, as his argument-vehicle. Go figure....MORE

How about we bring up the historical performance of Andy Maquires service? Now that a bottom may be getting close, its sure a LOT better. He LOST tons of dough with "core" positions in his service, and averaging down during the drops from 1900+. All the while he was talking about MASSIVE physical orders, supposedly there was a floor at 1750, how did that work out? I was a subscriber, it was a waste of money. He scalp traded his way to some occasional profits, but good luck getting the same kind of performance. Turd has turned into a shill, conspiracy theories and the like. Trading Gold and silver with leverage in these conditions is not for amateurs or the faint of heart, and definitely not for people who dont have a lot of capital. Good Luck. A fool and his money are easily parted.

DISCLAIMER: The charts and analysis provided here are not recommended for trading purposes. Trade at your own risk. The Turd provides knowledge not direction. Turd holds no liability for your trades and decisions but he's happy to take credit when credit is due, particularly through the "donate" button. Read more...